If you were president, who would you bomb?

Being POTUS ain’t for sissies.

Sometimes discussions take a silly direction when people talk about foreign affairs — specifically the role of the US military. And it happens with all kinds of people doing the talking; not just with everyday schmoes like you and me who can claim ignorance if pressed, but also with newscasters from major networks and talking heads who tout themselves as experienced in matters of politics, diplomacy, and national security.

The general silliness I’m referring to generally takes the form of handwringing and pearl-clutching about the brutality or insensitivity or inhumanity or just plain old inconsiderateness of a certain policy or action directed by the commander-in-chief.

The first time this silliness really made an impression on me (in the way things do sometimes… and a voice in my head goes “hmm, I have some thoughts on that matter”) was when Obama was president, and some very liberal liberals were critiquing the inhumanity of Obama’s use of drone strikes against US enemies. Obama’s aim was to keep up the war with Al Qaeda while extricating military personnel from intractable and costly (both in treasure and US lives) ground wars. In trying to do this, he ramped up the use of attack drones to ten times the level used by his predecessor, George W. Bush.

What was giving the liberal liberals the red ass was that these drone strikes were not the surgically precise tools of war that some people said they were. Civilians were being killed. Women and children and total bystanders. Under Obama, not only were there ten times the number of drone attacks launched, but there were ten times the number of civilian deaths resulting from those attacks.

Let’s for the purpose of brevity assume that the numbers quoted about Obama’s drone attacks are accurate. It certainly raises questions. And the angry, accusatory, disappointed tone of those questions is certainly understandable — those “collateral damage” statistics were innocent human beings.

There are a couple of questions that were raised in my mind, though, that I didn’t see any of the TV pundits and hand-wringing critics asking. Questions like “What is he supposed to do?”, or even “What would I do?”

Every president has had to accept within himself, sometime before he raised his hand and took the office, that he might have to direct the taking of human life if he thinks it is in defense of this country. It’s part of the deal. It’s the same pact with oneself that I made when I joined the Army in 1990. Desert Shield was brewing in the ME (and it soon became Desert Storm). Before I went in, I had some quiet moments with myself when I had to settle with the idea that this oath includes potentially taking a weapon and using it to kill someone.

If you had been president, would you have done nothing, and let the troop levels stand as they were; the ground wars grind on unaltered? Because all the wishful thinking in the world wasn’t going to make Al Qaeda just go home and take up basket weaving.

You might think it’s ridiculous or unrealistic to frame the discussion in terms of what you or I would do if we oversaw the military. The argument can be made that when a person is president, they get intelligence briefings and have resources that they can draw on to help them make those heavy decisions — intelligence and resources that regular people don’t have. So therefore, we can’t say what we would do; we just know that what Obama did was wrong.

I say that’s silly. I criticize presidents all the time. But I always allow for the possibility that you might not know WHAT you would do regarding war, until and unless you are the person responsible for making those international life and death decisions. My one exception to that is George Bush’s decision to invade Iraq after 9–11. I thought that was a stupid decision based on a lie then, and I think it was a stupid decision based on a lie now.

There’s a lot of handwringing and Monday morning quarterbacking going on about the disastrous, lightning-quick takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

What would you have done? We were in Afghanistan for 20 years. Long enough for a child to watch his father deploy there, then grow up, join the military and deploy there himself. Four presidents have wrestled with it. If you count military and contractors, over 6000 Americans have died in the war in Afghanistan. We tried to train them to fight for themselves. We tried to engage the Taliban diplomatically. We bombed them and sent troops and prayed and agonized over Afghanistan for 20 years.

We ALL knew the Taliban were not nice people. We ALL knew they would come back when we left. Biden had a son who was awarded the Bronze Star for heroism in that war. He didn’t make the decision lightly. He agreed with most Americans who have been answering in polls that they want us out of Afghanistan for years and years.

THERE. WAS. NO. “GOOD”. WAY. FOR. US. TO. LEAVE.

“It’s a crushing defeat” “It’s an intelligence failure” “It’s a foreign policy failure” “We should have stayed” “We should have given the Afghanis more warning” “We let our allies down” “We’ve destroyed our allies’ trust” “We should have known better”

…and my favorite, “HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED?!”

It goes on and on and on…
…and it’s silly.
I don’t know what I would have done.

And I’m glad as hell someone else has to make those decisions.